Water to Burn

by Katharine Kerr

  When I came up, he looked at me and quirked an eyebrow. His hair had gone gray at the temples, with a scatter of gray hair in the rest—First Gulf War vet, I figured. I leaned against the brass plaque on the Flood Building wall, right next to where he sat.

  “Mind if I join you?” I said.

  “Pretty girl like you?” He had a deep voice but pleasant. “Hell, no, I don’t mind.”

  For a moment or two we stayed companionably silent, waiting for a pair of the well-dressed employed to go past, her wrapped in a pink wool coat, him in a fitted leather jacket and tweed slacks. They glanced at us and hurried on fast.

  “Hey, Sarge,” I said, “someone told me you know where the rabbi is.”

  “Yeah? They was wrong.”

  “I’m not a cop.”

  “Sure you’re not.” He laughed.

  I slithered the rolled-up plastic bag of dope out of my jacket pocket, holding it tight against the cloth to keep it hidden. Once I held it securely, I casually relaxed my arm till the bag hung in his line of sight. He whistled under his breath and snatched it to stow it inside his own jacket.

  “Okay,” he said, “so you’re not a cop. My mistake, sorry’bout that. Why do you want to find the rabbi?”

  “I heard he has something to give me.” I handed him, openly this time, a pack of cigarettes and a folder of matches.

  “Thanks,” he said. “Let me light one of these, and we’ll talk. You want one?”

  “No, I don’t smoke.”

  “Smart girl. Wish I didn’t.”

  I squatted down next to him on the upwind side. My jeans groaned but, thank heavens, didn’t split. He lit the cigarette and took a couple of long drags. “Okay,” he said, “what’s your name?”

  “Nola.” I decided against adding my last name.

  Sarge grinned, exposing a couple of gaps between yellow teeth. “Okay, you’re right about that. He’s got a letter for you. I don’t know who it’s from. He just keeps talking about giving a letter to some chick named Nola O’Grady.”

  “That’s me, all right. How are we going to get together? I don’t have an address I can give you. My man won’t like it if I do, y’know?”

  Sarge nodded, took another drag on the cigarette, and considered the problem. “Not sure,” he said at last. “I don’t know where the rabbi is. Honest, I don’t. He freaked because a cop came up to him and knew his name. That was yesterday. He’s disappeared somewhere, but y’know he can’t have gone far. I mean, he’s got no money.”

  “Yeah, that usually keeps you close to home. He’s sure got a thing about flying saucers, doesn’t he?”

  “Jeez. You get sick of hearing it sometimes.”

  “Do you know why he’s so afraid of cops?”

  “Ain’t we all?” Sarge paused for a bellow of laughter. “But the rabbi, he swears up and down he got sent up for something he didn’t do. He ain’t going back inside, he tells me, not for nothing. Eighteen years, he told me, in slam.”

  “Where? Do you know?”

  “Somewhere in Israel, or that’s his story. How did you get all the way over here, then? I ask him. He never would say, just kept shaking his head. Weird. But it was the flying saucer people who put him away, he tells me, so who knows where it was?”

  “Uh, right, or if it happened at all.” Dimly I could see that everything I knew about Reb Zeke was hovering on the edge of making sense, albeit a very weird kind of sense, but I’d need more information before I could push it over that edge. “That’s too bad, either way.”

  “Yeah. I’ll tell him about you when I see him again. He’s bound to show up somewhere, one of the places that feed us, a shelter or something. I’ll tell him I saw you, and that you’re looking for him so you can get that letter.” He paused to gaze across Market Street toward Bloomingdale’s. “Most dry days I hang out around here, if the cops don’t roust me. The tourists, some of them part with a few bucks. You could come back here and find me, and maybe I’ll have news.”

  “Good idea.” I stood up, then took a twenty from my jeans pocket and held it out. “Thanks for the help.”

  Sarge grinned and took the bill, which disappeared so fast, with just the bare flick of his wrist and a shake, that I couldn’t see where in his clothes he’d hidden it.

  “Nice trick,” I said.

  “You don’t want people seeing when you get something worth stealing.” He laughed again. “I got plenty of free time to practice.”

  “There’ll be another one of those if you find the rabbi for me.”

  “Cool.” Again the gap-toothed grin. “I’ll keep an eye out.”

  By then a sporadic trickle of pedestrians flowed along the sidewalk, and out in the street traffic was picking up. I glanced around and saw Ari on the other side of Market, waiting for the light to change at the crosswalk in front of Bloomingdale’s. I realized a little late that Sarge might remember him from their encounter in the park.

  “See ya,” I said, “and the rabbi, too, I hope.”

  I trotted off toward the crosswalk and reached it just as the light changed. A small crowd hurried toward me, including Ari, who was walking behind a couple of well-dressed older men and a pair of young women wrapped in sleek trench coats and high-heeled boots—boutique clerks, I figured.

  I moved back out of the way and leaned against the cold stone wall of the old Woolworth’s building. The older men looked my way and nudged one another, but mercifully they kept walkng. The girls minced by, giggling, in a drift of heavy perfume. When I glanced down the street, I could tell that Sarge was watching me. He was close enough to see what I was doing but too far to recognize Ari, especially considering Ari’s clothing, so different from his police outfit of yesterday.

  Still, caution demanded I come up with a new wrinkle on my original plan. I opened the jacket and pulled it back on my shoulders to reveal the low-cut blouse. When Ari reached me, I smiled and said, “Hey, good-looking, want a date?”

  Ari stopped, looked me over with a perfect poker face, and said, “How much?”

  “Depends on what you want.”

  “Let’s discuss it. I’ll buy you some breakfast.”

  “Thanks.” I slipped my arm through his. “Sounds good.”

  I glanced back to see Sarge giving me the thumbs-up sign. He stood to get a share of whatever money this supposed john paid me, if he could deliver the rabbi and his mysterious letter.

  Ari and I did go out to breakfast, but over on Irving Street near the apartment in a narrow diner, a throwback to the Fifties with its chrome and beige Formica. The place reeked of decades of frying bacon. Ari ordered pancakes and chicken sausage. I had a scrambled egg and a glass of skim milk. While we ate, I told him what I’d learned from Sarge. The letter puzzled him as much as it did me.

  “How does Reb Ezekiel know your name?” Ari said. “I keep coming back to that.”

  “Yeah, me, too. The only theory I can come up with is that he’s immensely talented, psychically, I mean. This letter may not be an actual piece of paper, you know. It could be some message he saw in a dream with my name attached to it.”

  “Oh. Then I suppose it could be about aliens and spaceships.”

  “That’s my greatest fear, yeah.”

  Ari poured syrup over the stack of pancakes and dug in. I nibbled at my egg and considered the problem from several possible angles. Zeke might have picked my name up from the aura field if he could access that, and I suspected he could. His images of the Prophet Ezekiel must have derived from it. He might have run across Brother Belial or Caleb and gotten my name—and the letter—from them. The running across might have been physical, or it might have occurred in a trance state. Caleb knew who I was, and just maybe that meant Belial did, too.

  “I wish you’d eat like a normal person,” Ari said.

  I snapped myself back to the present moment. “Say what?”

  “You’ve been picking at that one sodding egg for ten minutes.”

  I realized he’d gone through
most of his breakfast.

  “Did you want to leave? I don’t have to finish it.”

  “No, quite the opposite. I want you to finish it. And have some of mine, too.”

  “This is plenty.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  We stared narrow-eyed at each other while a waitress hovered in the aisle beside our booth. She looked nervous, as if she expected us to start shouting. It occurred to me that we were on the edge of doing just that. As much as I disliked giving in, I refused to cause a scene in a public place.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll shovel it in. If you don’t want that last pancake, I’ll take it.”

  He smiled, a tight little expression, and put it on my plate. The waitress smiled in open relief and drifted away to attend to other customers. I shoveled food as promised.

  When we left, Ari shoved his hands in his jacket pockets and said not one word. Passersby stepped aside to let him go by or walked around him in a wide arc. When we reached the car, I drove, and he said nothing then, either. Nor did he speak as we went upstairs to the apartment. I let us in, then shut and locked the door behind us. I turned around to find Ari scowling at me with his arms crossed over his chest.

  “What’s wrong now?” I said.

  “I don’t appreciate having my partner act like a common prostitute.”

  “It was just my cover. Besides, you sure picked up the cue easily enough.”

  “I assumed you had a reason of some sort for the charade.”

  “It’s not like I ever was a hooker, if that’s what you’re worrying about.”

  “Of course it isn’t! Don’t you think I have more respect for you than that?”

  I caught myself on the edge of escalating the quarrel. “I don’t get it, Ari. What’s wrong?”

  “I just told you.”

  “No, you didn’t. I mean, I don’t think that’s the only thing. I don’t get why you’re so pissed off.”

  “What? You’re the one who’s so bloody psychic.”

  I thought I understood. “It’s all getting to you, isn’t it?” I said. “All these things that you thought didn’t exist. It must be kind of like culture shock—”

  “What a sodding condescending thing to say.”

  My mental calm tore like wet paper. “Then what’s so wrong? You sulky son of a bitch!”

  He stared at me, his mouth a little open, as if he wanted to speak but couldn’t find words. I stared right back, but I wondered why I wanted to attack despite the SAWM inside my head that was screaming retreat. I felt Qi gathering around me like a cloud of biting flies, sharp and tormenting—his anger, I realized, not mine.

  “What are you going to do?” I said. “Hit me?”

  Ari tossed his head like a frightened horse, took a deep breath, and stepped back. “Never,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  The SAWM died away. The cloud of Qi drew back and began to disperse, but slowly, one fly’s worth at a time. I felt so physically hot that a rivulet of sweat ran down my back. I took off the heavy jacket and tossed it onto the nearby computer chair, then ran my hands through my hair to lift it off my damp neck. Ari watched me with eyes that showed no feeling at all. I let the hair fall and wiped my sweaty palms on my jeans.

  Ari took off his jacket and hung it over the back of the chair with a careful, almost fussy set of gestures, centering the jacket, smoothing the sleeves, turning the collar down. Anger management, I said to myself. They taught him how to calm himself. I’d spotted the techniques before, but I hadn’t considered their implication. For the first time, I realized just how dangerous a man he was.

  “It takes me over sometimes,” he said. “I try not to let it. The rage, that is.”

  “Yeah, I guessed.” My voice sounded reasonably steady to me. “But do you have some kind of gripe to air?”

  “I don’t know.” He walked over to the couch and flopped down on it. “Nola, I’d rather cut off a hand than hurt you.”

  I hesitated. Prudence dictated that I sit on the computer chair with the coffee table between us. Prudence has never been my strong point. I sat down next to him on the couch and felt Qi begin to swirl around us, a turbulence in the air. He leaned back, slumped down with his legs stretched out in front of him, and rested his head on the top of the cushioned back of the couch.

  “There was someone, though, wasn’t there?” I tried to choose careful words. “That you did hit. Only once, probably, and a long time ago.”

  He stared up at the ceiling while he talked. “Oh, yes. We were both in the army at the time.” He hesitated again, just briefly. “I slapped her across the face. She struck up and broke my jaw with one punch.”

  I gained a sudden respect for Israeli womanhood.

  “She outranked me, too.” Ari turned his head and gave me a twisted little rueful smile. “I remember sitting on the floor of the hotel room in a great deal of pain and watching her call a doctor on the telephone. I can still see her standing there afterward, rubbing her sore knuckles and saying, ‘Oh, by the way, our affair’s over.’ I’d already assumed that, actually.”

  The stormy Qi began to smooth itself into a flow.

  “What did your superior officers have to say about all this? It couldn’t have been the first incident.”

  “It wasn’t, just the first involving a woman. They gave me a choice. Learn to control the temper, or be discharged. I learned. If I hadn’t been such a good marksman, they probably would have court-martialed me for striking an officer, but they didn’t want to lose my rifle. They wanted me to reenlist when the time came, you see, and move from military police to the special forces. As a sniper.”

  I saw a Possibility Image in my mind: Ari in battle gear, lying stretched out on a flat roof in pitiless sunshine, the rifle cradled in his arms, his beautiful eyes narrowed as he watched a target below.

  “Why didn’t you?” I said. “Become the sniper, I mean.”

  He returned to staring at the ceiling. The gray fog light, dappled from the lace curtain over the window, threw shadows across his face. I waited, then waited some more.

  He said, “I wanted to keep my soul.”

  For a couple of minutes we sat without speaking. Outside the N Judah streetcar rumbled past. A car alarm sounded, then stopped. Ari continued looking at the ceiling as if he were memorizing every stain and crack on it. I wondered how I could possibly want to stay involved with a man like him. Even though I’d just seen him take charge of himself and his rage, there could come a time when he’d choose not to control it. With a past like his, what could anyone expect from him but rage that now and then slipped its leash?

  “Are you going to end this?” he said. “Our affair, I mean.”

  I hesitated and cursed common sense.

  “I can’t blame you,” he went on. “We can still work together. I’ll promise you that.”

  “I’m not going to end anything.”

  He turned his head and looked at me, just looked for maybe a minute. “You need my rifle, too,” he said.

  “It’s more than that.” I leaned over and kissed him, a quick brush of my mouth on his. “The rifle’s just a bonus.”

  He sat up, and for a miserable moment I honestly thought he was going to cry. Instead, he put his hands on either side of my face and kissed me. The wave of Qi broke over us like warm water.

  We spent a long time in bed that afternoon. He fell asleep, eventually, while I lay awake and wondered if I’d been stupid or smart. We had to work together indefinitely because both our agencies had decreed we would. Trying to do so without sex would be impossible, I decided, because without that outlet his rage would take him over sooner rather than later. It was a nice psychological explanation and utter crap, of course, because the truth was simple: I didn’t want to give him up.

  I was expecting that neither of us would refer to the incident again, but he rose above my expectations. For dinner, we ate the remains of the deli food from the night before, while a soccer game played on the TV with the sound off
. About halfway through, Ari turned to me.

  “Do you want to know what set me off this morning?” he said.

  “You know what it was?”

  He nodded.

  “Yeah, I do want,” I said. “Because I don’t want to trigger it again.”

  “It was the way you took over the entire maneuver. I raised objections; you ignored them. It was obvious you were in charge.” He smiled, rueful again. “And then you had to go and be right.”

  “Oh.” My first thought: so, now you know what it feels like! Aloud, I said, “Yeah, I can see why that would get to you.”

  “But I’m not making an excuse for my later behavior. I take full responsibility for that.”

  I was willing to bet that those lines were right out of the manual for whatever program he’d been in. That he remembered them gave him high marks by my reckoning. “You could have told me right then,” I said.

  “Yes, I should have. I’m too used to working alone. I tried to tell you that when we first met.”

  “Well, I’m used to working alone, too.”

  “But you’re the head of an operation now, aren’t you?”

  Exactly what I’d taken on hit me hard. I was no longer a single operative consulting now and then with a pair of part-time stringers. Small as my team was, it had become just that, a team, and I needed to learn how to lead it. I had a brief moment of panic where I considered handing authority over to Ari. I squelched the idea and the panic both.

  “Yeah, I am the head of this op,” I said. “I’ve got a lot to learn, but I’ll learn it. Y’know, I’ve never been part of an army unit or even a sports team. This is all new.”

  “But you’ve been part of that peculiar mob you call your family.” His smile took any sting out of the words. “You can draw on that.”

  He was right. I could. I kissed him for it, too, despite the garlic and onions on his breath.